Many marketers consider PR (Public Relations) and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) as separate entities. Marketers often focus on SEO practices nowadays and run fewer PR campaigns because they consider it a soft discipline. However, it can be seen that PR and SEO share the same goals like brand awareness, building brand identity or reputation, social sharing, brand consistency, lead generation and so on.
PR and SEO can go hand in hand ensuring that your business gets attention through various media channels. So why not connect them and yield the benefits? Let me share with you how and why PR and SEO are interconnected.
What is PR?
PR is a strategic communication process that intends to create a positive reputation for a business amongst its prospective clients. Earlier, public relations involved press agentry and publicity. Nowadays, due to the advancement in digital marketing, it is more about relationship building and engagement. PR encompasses the following things:
- Interpreting public opinions that could affect the business/organization
- Protecting the reputation of the organization
- Planning and implementing the organization’s efforts that can change or influence public policy
What is SEO?
SEO intends to persuade search engines like Google to recommend your content to the people who are looking for solutions to their problems. It includes creating content that is understandable by the search engines, convincing the search engineers that you are a credible source and creating deliverable content. SEO encompasses the following:
- Finding high-quality traffic for your business website that is, people who are genuinely interested in your products/services
- Finding high-quantity of traffic from search engines
- Fining organic traffics for your business website that is, unpaid traffic
How are SEO and PR Interconnected?
From the above definitions, it is clear that the main motive of PR and SEO is to promote your business and find more customers. In PR, it is done by sharing your story with your clients through PR channels. In SEO, it is done by creating quality content, including keywords, backlinks, marketing and promotions. With a successful PR campaign, business owners can find new customers and make people aware of their business which is also valuable for SEO.
Here are 5 ways you can use SEO and PR together and benefit your business?
#1 Backlinking
- Backlinks are the bread and butter of SEO. Google often gauges a website’s authority in terms of its backlinks. If your website links to some other authoritative website, it is a good sign for SEO.
- Public relations can help you achieve high authority backlinks. For instance, if your PR article is published on a local newspaper website, it will be viewed as an influential website by the search engine. Thus, benefiting your SEO.
- So, if you run a PR campaign and an SEO campaign together intending to earn authoritative or influencing backlinks, your purpose is served.
#2 Keywords and trending topics
- SEO makes the use of keywords and trending topics to attract the audience and find a better place in the search engines.
- You can use the same to create your PR campaigns and attract your audience through it. Therefore, you must share your keywords with the PR team so that they can create content accordingly.
- Similarly, you can also share trending topics in your niche with your PR team or PR agency and they will create their content following them.
- Newsjacking is a brilliant way to create content that seeks promotion by itself. In this technique, you need to create content related to what’s happening in the news and your business will automatically find its way into the conversation.
#3 Promoting your brand on social media
- Since social media is an indispensable part of our lives, PR campaigns often focus on generating trending social media content so that more and more people recognize your brand.
- This kind of promotion on social media would also affect the traffic on your website as people might visit your website for more information or might want to buy your product or service.
- Your SEO team can work on the keywords trending on social media and use them to enhance your search engine rankings.
#4 Creating effective PR campaigns
- You can ask your SEO team to look through your PR campaigns and enhance them by incorporating keywords. They may also perform a search engine analysis on the PR content to measure its effectiveness.
- All of this would help in creating better PR campaigns in the future so that you can reach your target audience and enhance your business.
#5 Combining the media information
- SEO and PR professionals have different information at their disposal. While SEO professionals know more about the search engine rankings, visitor count, popular content and other such information. Combining PPC and SEO can enhance your PR efforts by increasing brand recognition and authority, leading to more organic traffic and improved search rankings. PR professionals know more about the tone or the voice of the brand, product information, goals of the business and so on.
- PR and SEO departments of a business can combine all of their information and help each other develop better campaigns. This way businesses can ensure that their voice is reaching the right audience at the right time.
Wrapping up
The way SEO and PR look at figures and content for a business might differ, but their intentions are the same. They want to engage more audiences, find new customers, retain old customers and build a significant identity of the brand. By integrating SEO and PR, a business can ensure its full potential. Website accessibility is an integral part of PR and SEO, ensuring inclusive user experiences and boosting brand reputation and visibility. After all, it is not about running efficient SEO and PR campaigns, it is about achieving the business goals altogether with the help of SEO and PR!
Author Bio:
Vanila Shakes is an academic dissertation writer and editor at GoDissertationHelp, a company that provides dissertation writing services in the UK. She likes to write about technology, education, psychology, marketing and lifestyle. In her free time, She loves watching Netflix and playing board games with her family.
